For most Users that are not Technophiles or Administrators this gets a bit tough in a hurry... It does give you and idea of some of the complexities you avoid when you call you local or major computer dealer and say "I want a computer." For most Users it becomes simplier to spend a few minutes to Donate and let Seti sort it out...

In the background I have a "partial" list of items needed (that I can share). I am sure that someone might have one or two used items laying around collecting dust. What is needed is to replace actually three servers. The hardest being kryten and it handles Uploads/Downloads and other processes. The information I have is that it should be at least 2.6Ghz H/T Intel Xeon with 6gig of minimum... and needs to be able to handle a fiberchannel card (PCI or PCI-E existing drives). If a stornger server for klaatu or koloth can be built then some process might be able to migrated that would ease some of the other issues that have recently plauged Seti...

Now, It gets tougher as a Server Boards are optimized hardware wise to handle all the stuff that never gets in the way of a User on a Workstation... Silly things Input/Output wise, like network connections, drive mappings, and handing processes to the CPU(s),

2. RAM it gets a bit tougher in that most servers run what is call ECC (error correction) and Registered... It has conflicting information about the system board in that it would handle up to 12 gig of RAM... It this is truly the case it could build a machine that could replace kryten and have room to grow a bit.

3. That last things that I will let "slip" is drives to expand for what is need in the not too far near future. These would be Sata II drives to fill where Uploads/Downloads need to happen... The need is for at least 6 to 8 of the same brand and size... If I were to go look at what I would buy on the the open market which gave the best value... I come up with this for an idea.

What I would pick at this point would be Western Digital Sata II... Or if you want a specific link...

Please Note:
This does not recomend that this Company that sells them only this price... You could go to your local computer store and purchase a new one that will do fine... Or there are many sites that you can get comparible deals. Now how to coordinate all this? Hmmmmmm

Many could say would they are not a "Raptor"... For most this is not a concern, in an array activity is spread across many spindles not a single drive thus throughput does not become an issue...

IF You can help with Hardware, once again I give my email address to help sort what and where... al.setiboinc (at) gmail.com replace the (at) with the @ symbol or Shift and the number 2

What I would pick at this point would be Western Digital Sata II... Or if you want a specific link...

For this sort of application, you'd need to look at the Seagate Barracuda ES series, or the Western Digital YS series as these drives are designed to run 24/7, as well as their firmware being optimised for use in RAID arrays.

What I would pick at this point would be Western Digital Sata II... Or if you want a specific link...

For this sort of application, you'd need to look at the Seagate Barracuda ES series, or the Western Digital YS series as these drives are designed to run 24/7, as well as their firmware being optimised for use in RAID arrays.

We don't get western digital drives at this point. Eric should check me on this, but I believe he discovered a major firmware bug on those drives which cause data corruption when doing large-scale memory mapping to files on linux systems, and as far as we know this hasn't been corrected yet. So not very useful with large-scale databases like ours.

- Matt
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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

We don't get western digital drives at this point. Eric should check me on this, but I believe he discovered a major firmware bug on those drives which cause data corruption when doing large-scale memory mapping to files on linux systems, and as far as we know this hasn't been corrected yet. So not very useful with large-scale databases like ours.

We don't get western digital drives at this point. Eric should check me on this, but I believe he discovered a major firmware bug on those drives which cause data corruption when doing large-scale memory mapping to files on linux systems, and as far as we know this hasn't been corrected yet. So not very useful with large-scale databases like ours.

We don't get western digital drives at this point. Eric should check me on this, but I believe he discovered a major firmware bug on those drives which cause data corruption when doing large-scale memory mapping to files on linux systems, and as far as we know this hasn't been corrected yet. So not very useful with large-scale databases like ours.

- Matt

Any further details?

All I've seen are comments about some WD drives giving long time-outs when making their own data error recovery. That then times out that drive from a RAID controller and the drive gets marked as failed.

If you are going to purchase a drive the Link to the Seagates below should do...

Thank You for the Response..

Pappa

We don't get western digital drives at this point. Eric should check me on this, but I believe he discovered a major firmware bug on those drives which cause data corruption when doing large-scale memory mapping to files on linux systems, and as far as we know this hasn't been corrected yet. So not very useful with large-scale databases like ours.

- Matt

Any further details?

All I've seen are comments about some WD drives giving long time-outs when making their own data error recovery. That then times out that drive from a RAID controller and the drive gets marked as failed.

All I've seen are comments about some WD drives giving long time-outs when making their own data error recovery. That then times out that drive from a RAID controller and the drive gets marked as failed.

The problem we've seen is random corruption on single drives or software RAID drives when doing large amounts of memory mapped I/O. It seems to be some interaction between the Linux IOMMU subsystem on x86_64 and the firmware on the drives. Kernel developers blamed the WD firmware, which seems reasonable since we haven't been able to reproduce the problem on other drives. Never got a response from WD although they may have talked directly to the kernel developers. For all I know the WD may have solved the problem, but finding out would cost more in time than the difference in price between WD and other manufacturers.

I haven't tried the drives in hardware RAID configurations because of the possibility of silent corruption if they have issues there.

...and Hitachi. For those whom may have forgotten; or, are unaware, a number of years ago Hitachi and IBM got together. Hitachi has taken over IBM's "Deskstar" Hard Drive line. These drives are very very solid.

I would have recommended Maxtor; however, as Seagate has taken over Maxtor recently, I am hesitant to make such a recommendation. In my experience, and from friends' and colleagues' experiences with Seagate Drives - they tend to fail early and have even greater Dead In Box issues. I myself have had many such experiences in the past, and this has left a very VERY bad taste in my mouth pertaining to Seagate.

As stated, Western Digital isn't much better as of late. About nine years ago, they, (in my opinion), shot themselves in the proverbial foot when they cut back their R&D and Q&A Departments. (Except for their High End Drives.) This has had me stay away from Western Digital since 1998.

However; Hitachi is a viable and strong drive. Check out the current "Deskstar" Line by them. Great warranty, great product.

I've got Seagate Barracuda's in use as old as Ultra SCSI models (those double sized heavy boys) which still work 100%.

I've had 3 Seagate IDE drives and all of them failed within a year, one of them being DOA.

2: For Maxtor, I'm quite happy with them overall, a decade ago I would've said they sucked, because they both had high failure levels and made this eery metallic noise that you just knew wasn't healthy, but over the last 4 or 5 years, I haven't had a single failure with Maxtor drives.

But as Timelord said, they are now also Seagate, so they might be going in the wrong direction again.

3: Western Digital drives have all sorts of problems with all sorts of chipsets in Linux and Unix. I haven't experienced any failures with them, but never knowing if there might be an incompatibility with your other hardware that noone knows about yet is not something you want to have in the back of your mind with every problem you run into in your production environment.

4: Hitachi, IBM, Toshiba and Samsung are brands I can say nothing but good about. Samsung only does ATA/SATA though and Toshiba only does Laptop drives.

In my experience, and from friends' and colleagues' experiences with Seagate Drives - they tend to fail early and have even greater Dead In Box issues. I myself have had many such experiences in the past, and this has left a very VERY bad taste in my mouth pertaining to Seagate.

:-)
I've had the opposite experience, almost half a dozen dead Maxtors personally over the last 10 years, 3 IBM SCSIs (early 10,000 RPM drives running in rather warm (all right, hot) conditions) & yet to have a Seagate fail.

AFAIK- Maxtor, although bought out by Seagate, is still running it's own manufacturing facilites. I beleive it'll be a good couple of years before they fully rationalise their product lines, design, sales & manufacturing.
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Grant
Darwin NT.

It was suggested by several in email that I setup a PayPal Account for Hardware... I was aware that Simon was working on that.. So we might be able to have Simon make a modification to help construct a Server that will do the job.

Eric and Matt are not objectionable to a "white box server" it would cost about $8000.00 or less to construct. What you are looking is an appropriate case, a Server Motherboard, two Dual Core 2xx series Opterons and a PILE of RAM and drives to meet a minimum of 3 Plus Terabytes (the current amount of the daily turnover of workunits out and results back) ...

To give an idea of what is being talked about I can give public links to various parts. Ideally a phone call is made saying I want a server to these specifications and a company puts together the best they can and the is the price assembled. Then EDU discount Might be had...

Example:
A 3U with 16 raid level drives for around 4 Terabytes of fast protected raid...From Server Direct So if you go look and plug in the two AMD 280's, two gig of RAM in each slot (16 gig), the Raid Controller for all 16 drives and then pick 16 Seagate Sata II 320's (drives bigger than 320 are okay but what is need is all 16 spindles reading and writing data for speed and they are the best bang for the buck). Note this ia "retail price and not what some could get it for wholesale)..

It will give you an Idea of what is needed...

So go look and click dots to get an idea... Yes if enough people decided that they wanted to build this (or one like it) it could be done...

I use Hitachi Deskstar and Travelstars in all my machines. Though it's only been 2-3 years service, I've never had one fail or be RMA'd. Mine are ATA and Sata, and Sata II. Ask me again in a few years.

My Athlon has a 40 gig drive like that. It was built to run SETI and has a Abit NF7- S, S being serial drive. It was the best that money could buy at that time. All Nvidia chips with 64 meg ddr ram on the video agp card. This is my over the counter hardware to run SETI. It waa assembled and kept running by me to run SETI. That is the third hard drive in that computer. It now has a new power supply as of 1/10/07. That is the second board so I could use Nvidia chips in it.
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Okay a couple of items needed quickly towards the kryten replacement I will give example links... They are representative of what is needed and some users might have them laying around collecting dust...

It has been requested that I setup a PayPal account for hardware, I have asked Simon if that could be accomplished in the Seti PayPal account he has setup to take care of the PayPal issues... Then there would be only one account that could handle what is needed and no extra auditing...

Some might ask why I give a generic links and they have suppliers that can do things a reduced cost... I have worked with Compaq, HP and Dell and in those circumstances had the phone number to call for what was needed... I think the biggest reason I am doing this is, to allow everyone to see what things cost to run Servers... At the end of the message I will give my public email address... You are welcome to ask me questions or if you have things that can help, I can put you in touch with Eric within minutes...

Eric and Matt are not objectionable to a "white box server" it would cost about $8000.00 or less to construct. What you are looking is an appropriate case, a Server Motherboard, two Dual Core 2xx series Opterons and a PILE of RAM and drives to meet a minimum of 3 Plus Terabytes (the current amount of the daily turnover of workunits out and results back) ...

A good idea that could give good results.

However, some care and time is needed to avoid suffering frustration and wasting a lot of time. It takes a good bit of prior checking to ensure that all the components fit together well and for best performance. I've seen far too many office PCs crippled by cost cutting or just simply choosing whatever components 'are to hand' that then gives a non-optimal mix.

The most often ignored problem is that of case cooling and cooling of the components inside the case. There is much more to keeping cool than just adding more fans. Airflow over the components and pressure balance is more important than most people realise. Many (most!) PC cases are very bad for this.

Another aspect frequently completely overlooked is that of maintainability. How easy is it to swap out the disks, PSU, CPU, RAM or other peripherals and cabling?...

The one advantage of buying a preassembled system is that the builders have hopefully some good design experience and that a full system warranty is given.

Ooops... Bit of treatise there. The summary is: All well and good if useful. Otherwise, it may become an unwanted distraction that steals time away from s@h for troubleshooting and 'fixing' whatever.

Keep up the good work!

Regards,
Martin
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